The Copenhagen Papers

by Michael Frayn

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Act One

  Act Two

  Epilogue

  Also by Michael Frayn

  Copyright

  The authors wish to thank Petra Abendroth for her contribution to this book.

  PROLOGUE

  Michael Frayn

  It was a long war for the original London cast of my play Copenhagen. The three of them—David Burke, Sara Kestelman, and Matthew Marsh—played it from May 1998 until August 1999, first in repertory at the National Theatre for nine months, then straight into the West End to do seven performances a week at the Duchess for another six months. It’s a play that makes great demands upon its small cast. All three of them are onstage virtually throughout the evening, discovering quantum mechanics and developing nuclear fission, then exploring some of the philosophical darknesses of the human mind.

  On the August night that they finally came to the end of their grueling tour of duty, we all went out to dinner afterward to celebrate. They had certainly earned a celebration, but they must have been almost too tired to enjoy it, like exhausted troops returning from the front, and they must have felt that the rest of us there—Michael Codron, who produced the play in the West End, and who was giving us the dinner; Michael Blakemore, who directed the production; and I—could never share what they had been through. We had been left behind, the staff officers who had sent the troops into battle, then spent the war in safety and idleness many miles behind the front line.

  In spite of all this, David Burke and I, at any rate, spent the evening in the most animated conversation. But then he and I had a great deal to talk about, and a second cause for celebration. For us the evening marked the end not just of his stint at the front but of another long trail—and a rather more bewildering one for both of us.

  Like me, David is in his mid-sixties, and though we’d never worked together before I had admired him for a long time, from when I first saw him in the original production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular in 1973, to his most recent appearance as Kent in Richard Eyre’s fine production of Lear at the National—a great arc of career spanning nearly thirty years and the whole range of English theatre, from the funniest of comedies to the most harrowing of tragedies. His performance as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in my play had been quite remarkable, and his incarnation of Bohr’s celebrated combination of percipience and innocence, of toughness and lovability, had moved me deeply. It was not his acting that we were talking about, however, nor, for that matter, the riches of wisdom and experience that we must both have accumulated in the course of our long lives. We were talking about the contents of the large brown envelope on the floor between our two chairs. We were discussing the mysterious batch of papers whose gradual emergence over the previous months had preoccupied us both almost as intensely as the play had.

  The subject of Copenhagen, I should explain, is itself a mystery—the strange visit that the German physicist Werner Heisenberg paid to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. They were old friends and colleagues, but Denmark was now under German occupation, and Heisenberg had become an enemy. Though he couldn’t say it openly to Bohr, he had also become the head of the Nazi government’s nuclear program. The two men had a private conversation that ended abruptly and angrily, and their great friendship along with it, but no one has ever been able to reconstruct what they said to each other, or to agree on what Heisenberg’s intentions were in making his unwelcome but evidently pressing visit.

  The papers in the large brown envelope at our feet related to a later chapter in the story, when Heisenberg, together with all the other German physicists who had been involved in atomic research, was rounded up by the British at the end of the war and secretly interned for six months in Farm Hall, a country house on the outskirts of Godmanchester, in Huntingdonshire. It was another bizarre episode. As Heisenberg had now told Bohr 299 times in the play:

  Our families in Germany are starving, and there are we sitting down each evening to an excellent formal dinner with our charming host, the British officer in charge of us. It’s like a pre-war house-party—one of those house-parties in a play, that’s cut off from any contact with the outside world, where you know the guests have all been invited for some secret sinister purpose. No one knows we’re there—no one in England, no one in Germany, not even our families. But the war’s over. What’s happening? Perhaps, as in a play, we’re going to be quietly murdered, one by one. In the meanwhile it’s all delightfully civilised. I entertain the party with Beethoven piano sonatas. Major Rittner, our hospitable gaoler, reads Dickens to us, to improve our English.…

  “Did these things really happen to me?” wonders Heisenberg in astonishment as he recalls them. They certainly did, because the events at Farm Hall, unlike those in Copenhagen, are most thoroughly documented. The house had been comprehensively bugged by British Intelligence, who made recordings of the German scientists’ unguarded conversations among themselves in order to find out, presumably, how much they had discovered about building an atomic bomb. The transcripts of these recordings were kept secret by the British government until 1992, when they were at last pried loose by a combined task force of historians and scientists, and finally published.

  The papers in the envelope, however, were something else again—a completely new source of information about Farm Hall—and they cast an astonishing new light on the story. Now that David was free from the distracting pressures of those seven mighty performances a week, I suggested to him that we should collaborate to write a brief account of the documents, and of the way in which they had come to light, taking turns to explain how each of us had been involved at each separate stage. He agreed.

  So here it is, laid out rather like the dialogue in a play. MF speaks first; DB speaks second; and we shall both have a lot more to say to each other before we are through. It’s a bit like a play in other ways as well: the story falls neatly into two acts, each neatly rounded off by a celebratory dinner, and there will be plenty of dramatic conflict between the two of us before we reach the resolution and reconciliation over that final dinner at the end of Act Two.

  A two-hander, then, for Actor and Author, with a mystery, a moral—several morals, perhaps—and a variety of stratagems, pratfalls, reversals of fortune, and painful soul-searchings along the way.

  David Burke, now that I come to think about it, would be excellent casting to play David Burke. He has all the right qualities.

  I don’t know who could play my part.

  Not me, though, in this particular story. Thank you. Not me.

  ACT ONE

  MF:

  The story began for me at about nine o’clock one morning the previous January, when Michael Blakemore phoned.

  I was surprised at the call. Michael is not a great enthusiast for the bleak dawn hours, and over all the thirty years that we have been friends and all the six plays we have worked on together I don’t believe he has ever called when the new day was quite so young. I also knew that he was going to be working that morning, rerehearsing the cast of Copenhagen in preparation for moving out of the Cottesloe auditorium at the National onto the somewhat smaller stage of the Duchess. But from the sound of his voice he plainly had urgent news.

  A very curious letter had arrived in the morning post, he explained, and he had
to read it over to me at once. It came from an address in Chiswick, and was signed Celia Rhys-Evans. “Some weeks ago,” Michael read out to me, “as an anniversary treat, my husband and I came to see Copenhagen under the mistaken assumption that it was a play about the capital of Denmark, where we had spent a very happy honeymoon many years ago. Also, we had loved Michael Frayn’s wonderful farce Noises Off. You can imagine that, in the event, our visit to the National Theatre proved a disconcerting experience.”

  I laughed at the poor woman’s misunderstanding.

  “I know,” said Michael. “Very funny. But wait, wait! There’s more to come.”

  Something in the play had finally caught Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s flagging interest—the long speech in the first act in which “the German man” talks about his stay at Farm Hall. “This was clearly the same house which we had lived in for a short time in the 60s,” she said. “We didn’t stay long because it was very cold and damp: no central heating. We knew nothing about its wartime role, but while we were there, and in the course of some refurbishings, we did come across some pages in German under one of the floorboards in the attic. We kept them at the time, because the children, who were quite young, were intrigued by them.

  “I felt quite sure that they had gone with us when we moved out of there, but we have only recently been able to lay hands on them. I have no idea what they are about but you might as well have them, as otherwise they will only end up on the compost heap. There were many more pages, but I’m afraid they have gone the way of all flesh.

  “Please let me know if they should prove significant, but feel free to make what use you will of them.”

  Enclosed with the letter, said Michael, were two crumpled and torn sheets of paper, handwritten on both sides in German. Not knowing any of the language, he had merely glanced through them—but at once two very familiar names had leapt out at him: Diebner (one of the German physicists interned at Farm Hall) and Rittner (the British officer in charge of them). There was also an even more familiar phrase: uranium 235, the fissile isotope that the German team had had such difficulties in separating, and at least one formula containing the letter U, the chemical symbol for uranium.

  I saw why Michael had phoned at nine o’clock in the morning. I went straight round to his house, collected the text, and began work on it at once.

  It was obviously going to take some time. The first few words on the recto of each page were easy enough, because the sheets had evidently been torn out of some kind of British ledger, perhaps a log of incoming and outgoing messages with code words, and had four column headings written in English capitals:

  But then the difficulties began. Like Michael, I could pick out some familiar landmarks—Diebner, Rittner, uranium 235. But although I can read printed German fairly fluently, I found the handwriting remarkably opaque. It began reasonably straightforwardly:

  But thereafter it became harder. The problems were compounded because the pages were very crumpled and worn by folding, and because in places the writing had been washed away by damp. Even where I could decipher the words I could make no sense at all of some of the syntax.

  Slowly I transcribed, marking “[?]” wherever I was doubtful:

  Allgemeine Hinweise: Bitte lesen Sie diese Anleitung vor Montagebeginn sorgfältig durch. Bewahren Sie die Anleitung als Information für Wartungsarbeiten und zur Ersatzbestellung sorgfältig auf. 103 (x + 50 [or SO]/Z/100> <[?] 10% Ur X 19t) Die Platten der Automatik-Tischtennis-Tische Art-Nr 7121 sind nicht wetterfest. [?] Col. RITTNER Schützen Sie daher die Platten vor Feuchtigkeit, bzw, setzen Sie sie nicht Uranium 235 unmittelbar Warmequellen aus. Eine Wöbung der Plattenhälften kann die Folge sein. Rittner. Bei etwaigem Verzug Diebner. Bei etwaigem Verzug empfiehlt es sich, die Platten einige Tage auf eine ebene Unterlage zu lagen …

  And translated:

  General notes: Please carefully read this introduction before beginning the assembly. Keep the introduction carefully as information for servicing and ordering replacements. 103 (x + 50[or SO]/Z/100> <[?] 10% Ur × 19t) The surface sections of the automatic table-tennis table type number 7121 are not weatherproof. [?] Col. RITTNER Therefore protect the surfaces from damp, and for that matter do not expose them to uranium 235 directly from hot sources. This can result in warping of the surfaces. In the case of any possible [?] distortion Diebner. In the case of any possible [?] distortion it is recommended that the surfaces should be laid on a level base for a few days …

  It seemed to be some kind of scientific joke. One of the interned physicists had evidently entertained himself, or the rest of the team, by writing out the instructions for using a table-tennis table as a parody of a pedantic scientific paper. I was of course disappointed; the references to uranium 235, etc., had seemed to promise something more—even the revelation that the German team had some secret understanding of the atomic bomb that they had managed to conceal from their captors and history.

  I was also a little disappointed, I have to confess, at the joke itself. One of the more depressing and fanciful manifestations of British chauvinism is the fixed belief that the Germans are not blessed as we are with a sense of humor (though since so few of us can understand German it’s difficult to be sure quite how we have discovered this—and I also wonder quite how exemplary our own sense of humor would seem to German if they didn’t understand English, and if we had to translate all our jokes into German for them). The ponderous formulations about the danger of the table-tennis table warping through contact with hot uranium 235 and all the rest of it seemed to confirm the dreariest prejudices, though. I wondered if perhaps (and here my own prejudices began to emerge) it was an example not so much of German humor as of academic humor, and if academic humor knew no boundaries.

  But was it a joke? Why were there so many anomalies? Why was Rittner described as a colonel, when anyone who had spent six months at Farm Hall under his command must have known perfectly well that he was a major? Why was the chemical formula spatchcocked so abruptly into the text? Why, above all, was the syntax so bizarre? “In the case of any possible distortion Diebner. In the case of any possible distortion…”

  Could there be some other message buried in all that humorousness? Could this table-tennis table just possibly be something more than a table-tennis table? Farther down the page I could see a thumbnail sketch:

  Whatever this represented, it didn’t seem to be a table-tennis table, or any part of one.

  I struggled on. The table was qualified as being a Kettler. I couldn’t find this word in my German dictionary. Could it have any connection with the Ketten in a Kettenreaktion, a chain reaction? Whatever it was, it was plainly something potentially hazardous, since there were repeated assurances that it was “constructed and tested with a view to the most up-to-date safety technology,” and that by handling it in the way laid down during the setting-up phase “the risk of injury will be largely excluded.” Users were to bear in mind, however, that improper use “may lead to unforeseeable situations and risks, which exclude responsibility on the part of the manufacturer.”

  The German team is known to have been scrupulous in protecting their laboratory staff from the risk of radioactivity—though they had then gone on to construct an experimental reactor that had no safeguards at all, and that would have killed all the physicists themselves if they had ever managed to get it to go critical. Whatever this Kettler was, it seemed to have required instructions framed either in the spirit of the care they had shown for their staff or else in recognition of the dangers they had run themselves.

  The next sentence, however, defied any reading I could think of:

  “Show anyone you are playing with, particularly Rittner children.”

  Major Rittner had his children with him at Farm Hall? In the middle of an Intelligence operation so secret that no one in Britain was supposed to know of the German physicists’ existence? This was the oddest detail in all the oddities so far.

  And I hadn’t yet struggled to the bottom of the first page. />
  DB:

  I could see that Michael Blakemore was not quite his urbane self as soon as he arrived in the rehearsal room.

  He is a remarkable director; his single aim is to serve the play, without ego, without fuss, without attention-seeking. Quite unusual in this age! Mostly he has an unhurried and often amused manner, very useful in establishing a relaxed atmosphere in rehearsal. That morning, though, he had an urgent and excited air, and without even asking for a cup of coffee he called us all together, actors and stage management.

  “I have something quite extraordinary to tell you,” he announced.

  And he told us all about the mysterious document that had arrived in the post that morning. We were soon all as excited as he was. What seemed most significant to us was that these ancient papers had apparently emerged from under the floorboards. As Sara said: “You don’t put papers under the floorboards without some good reason. What do you think they say, Michael?”

  “I’ve passed them on to Michael Frayn,” said Blakemore. “He can read German. He’s trying to decipher them right now. But I could see the name Diebner mentioned. Also Rittner. There are some formulae or calculations. And a diagram. It looks like a crude sketch of some kind of machine. It could solve one of the central mysteries explored in the play: Did Heisenberg know how to make the bomb, and did he deliberately scuttle it? Even if it doesn’t tell us that, it could still be extremely significant in historical terms.”

  It may be a little difficult for an outsider to understand the excitement we shared. We had lived with these characters for the best part of a year, and the Farm Hall episode was a crucial part of their story. Every time we performed the play, I would listen to Matthew’s long speech in the first act about their stay at Farm Hall half a century ago—“It’s like a pre-war house-party—one of those house-parties in a play, that’s cut off from any contact with the outside world…”—and I would find myself ruminating on their lives there. I had come to feel a sharp sympathy for them. They had, after all, come through the trauma of struggling to work amid the ruins of a Berlin battered by months of Allied bombing, of failing to build even a reactor, let alone a bomb, and of losing the war. Then they had been rounded up and kept in isolation from the world, not allowed to communicate with their families, or even to know why they were being held. Onstage each night I would find myself trying to imagine some of the detail of their daily routine. We know they played cards and table tennis, and that Heisenberg gave them recitals of Beethoven piano sonatas. I couldn’t help wondering if boredom had perhaps tempted any of them into the world of practical joking, either among themselves or at the expense of their British captors—apple-pie beds, water bombs, false alarms—anything to relieve the repetitive routines of a captive existence.